Life is passing me by again slipping faster than the sun slips naturally over the horizon as we run from it or forget ourselves in the moving present when we think we’re living life to the fullest in the thick of things not recognizing the passing just there at the edges of our petit recitimmersed as we are in the moment aloof to the moment’s unwillingness to immerse itself in us

Second Rotation

Tell me they do that even a Jew has a place to go after death bet he’s looking down on me smiling now as I look away from his moment to consecrate my own eerily his music casts its’ faint spell and for a time this dusty clam of a universe is alight with the vigor of a more manly epoch always back then or over there never seems to be right here except when Singer sings to you like he sang to me just now reason for pause perhaps even a reflective tribute

Third Rotation

Smoke rises more clearly in your lungs when it hasn’t been pushed down by continual puffing or maybe that’s just flu season overcoming us still to cough despite not smoking is reason enough to smoke anew as if the fates were bound to chuckle at you little man fine fellow adjusting this and that tinker with life like a tinkerer tinkers with grandfather’s clock the tick-ticking is an achievement to be proud of not an ominous reminder that time’s running out and all your tinkering is for naught.

Fourth Rotation

Dusk is cut from a different cloth these cold winter days there seems to be a numberless shade of cadet blue in the skies when autumn no longer reflects itself in the closing hours and the Earth is coated in its’ stayed vapid white preserver the sunset no longer inspires so much as it looms

Fifth Rotation

How preferable; this season when color has been cut from existence and daytime is only a shade of the darkness to come, to the lover’s sweet springtime illusion whose warm embrace softens us for the dull thud of a summer’s day that seems to last forever when in fact it’s numbered like the love it carries in its’ bosom

Sixth Rotation

There it shines from dawn’s early light to the nighttime that seems to crawl over us at a snail’s pace humanity’s star raining rays of life now illuminates the cold death like the living bury the dead spending tears on spent dust so the seasons turn, I guess that even the Sun pauses every so often to consider the hoarfrost leaving us to blow trembling bursts of air fits of supplication hoping that a spark of the Divine star crackling in an iron box might take flight huddling round the heat almost lets us forget just how much we resemble the moon pass our own terminator sometime and we might remember if we could just turn away from the calenture and find the strength for a moment of torpidity somewhere frigid and dark enough for our eyes to be the only guiding light and our bodies the sole source of heat

Seventh Rotation

The writing on the wall doesn’t look very promising today still intelligible. only when the shadows cease being our friends do we truly open our eyes to what stands behind them seek out the puppet master sagacious scribbler dancing fool chase your own tail while you’re at it

Eighth Rotation

A man can think up a million ways to make life difficult for himself so I can understand why half the time he doesn’t think what I don’t get is how he can abide the simple life the bourgeoisie “yes” and “no” that tells a weary traveler that he’s safer now eating eggs and bacon at midnight on the side of a bucolic Michigan road wondering at what cost this happy condition was bestowed upon him washing away the doubts with coffee refills that mystic rule of thumb that presumes modern plumbing and common sense so incomprehensible to the world at large.

Ninth Rotation

Told me too they did before I took off to go land that drinking ice-cold water can make a man sick so hold the ice no shaking or stirring just blank looks on both sides of the Atlantic and a queasy sense making its way through your stomach that your role in all this is to piss everybody off no matter where you are

Tenth Rotation

So there you go crawling under the covers again while a picture perfect moon just outside your window seems to do the same crawling under charcoal clouds obfuscating and beclouding their illuminator ‘if,’ you wonder aloud, ‘something like that is even possible’ but how else would you describe what your eye spied moments before the delirium of sleep sedated your mind wandering the night sky which just as well could have signified the daytime since her colors were an ecstatically woven contradistinction to the mean variations of the passing day What was it they said? admiring the simpler virtues of work and family? damned if I know but it sounded too good to be true surely some rote satisfaction lurks beneath the surface when you throw on a pair of $100 jeans to go dig ditches in the middle of nowhere the only diesel engine in sight is your body mindless in its’ habitual labor the owl of Minerva has purposefully taken flight not sure of its’ direction only of the urgency with which it needs to shed awareness of the present in order to absorb it anew lest the present kill you with its’ dig-write-eat-sleep-dig melody pounding your brain into jelo like when you wedge your shovel just under that frozen layer of Earth it peels off quite nicely as if the world were an orange. take heart, they’d say, you’re still a most fashionable farmer what with that crop of hair cut by scissors “we don’t use scissors,” she tells me prolonging my stay in the big smoke waiting for the one guy who does to open his shop at two o’clock and hey presto a man who isn’t a lawn mower shows up for $15 so that now you can stand in the middle of no where peeling the Earth throwing her back upon herself shifting the ground as you shift your mind out of here tell yourself you’re a spelunker down here in your lonely cave anything to make you feel better “we possess art lest we perish of the truth,” indeed? then again, you consider, pausing to shift from one side of your important hole to the other that ‘truth’ seemed to lurk everywhere you went artist your whole life is a “where?” never a “what?” so where is this, your possession your precious life preserver seems to me, dig-flip-pat, it’s all in your head the truth slipped under the moonlit clouds last night as you slipped under the covers

Eleventh Rotation

and sometimes you manage to remember yesterday by the color of the leaves that’s your calendar now Thursdays and Mondays and all that jive don’t mean a thing here yesterday was a frightening day when you woke up to the morning massacre nature’s dead, raped by winter’s rime having been laid to rest in the calm breeze of last years autumn night but that was centuries ago now there’s only a lackluster, misty antecedent to the night called ‘day’ which is a full rotation a cycle in your is-ing penetrated every so often by the moment when the worldliness of the world is brushed away forevermore or did you think yourself immortal? little leaf, little trace of Hoarfrost’s transgressions

Twelfth Rotation

Robert Frost appears on the horizon where his mending wall should be calling out to remind you just how naïve you’ve been all along for reading his drivel and rather than saying ‘Elves’ saying it on your own because the stone carrying savage is a world away from tossing stones at him preferring to toss it on the wall they’ve come together to lay and maybe he can question the effect but don’t question the intent what ribs him is whether a fence makes for good neighbors have a neighbor who doesn’t know the word and you have friends like Agathocles had who need to be changed as only the Florentine could try to ask them to mend a wall get up close and personal by all means only arm yourself because the closer you get the closer you’ll be there’s no distance in his face just the crude expression of a two pint half whit a savage shorn of his stick stuck in the modern world oblivious to your orchard oblivious to you oblivious period and no, no, you say, with Robert, “If I could put a notion in his head,” tells you that he hasn’t got one a head that is making art’s purpose clear because you’d probably die if you had to look at that stump masquerading for a fella’s head no spring mischief there, Robert no tragic mending walls to be built just a concrete barrage bad art? worse science

Thirteenth Rotation

Then the game begins Settling in dayness Measured in keystrokes make a Muse of your misery, poet sing an ode to your back breaking toil:

24 rounds round the clock carry forth that concrete block strain your back and flex your arms savor your strength; your lucky charms insist as an old Sailor rests weary that fatigue is boring and dreary so forward march and on you go! trudge heroic through winter’s snow hah! – look askance at innovative flare question your strength science would dare? better hoof it, burly beams on back than on a wheel barrel neatly stack still if your elder does insist you’d do well not to resist it goes quicker and hey, you’re done a pity you’ve nothing to do for fun run back inside then, double speed ! flip open Heidegger; pretend to read knock-knock on your skull hopefully inspiration isn’t null? might as well sit down and write nothing else to do late night wisdom thus shows its self the last resort; a pitiful pelf muscles tense, pulse beats fast enjoy your youth until the last death surrounds in snow white blur its’ reminder lurking in old cat’s fur 20 years of purring and meows poor old cat finds it hard to rouse one eye blind, his legs slowly numb the noble Persian’s time has come? dies like Socrates he does, sans hemlock what with legs being first to go out of stock still he feasts on raw meat with joy savoring life; a child’s grand toy

Fourteenth Rotation

Tells me he does while I’m digging ditches that where and when make for the limits of what who even cares when you’ve covered all the bases? been there, done that Suddenly, the rustle of trees blowing in the wind is replaced by the rustle of chatter blowing amidst the smoke of the one café in this forsaken land that tries to remind you of another the one in Union Square that you never went to really preferring to sit under Washington’s main while black shadows threw kicks and white trash threw up – or was that you down at the Lansing Vu more drunk off women’s perfume than old American blues as usual – you’re just passing by your autumn wind pocket lasts a bit longer than that of the leaves your arc somewhat wider and the black girl standing by the café register who’d melt into the Manhattan skyline or make you feel out of place in downtown Detroit suddenly becomes unique against Warsaw’s eternal winter white here she’s got a story to tell its moral? inimitability is a question of place and time ‘might as well be in Ukraine Warsaw chic is orange these days’ you note with the pathos of a man who’s seen this stuff before the stuff of revolution and the tragic ease with which a color captures a man but as long as your old cat and the old flower lady making her rounds in the café keep coming by to vie for attention you know you’re safe a good thing too, breathing easy is hard enough Warsaw air saturated leaded smog relic of a fifty year lull might as well smoke up then and feign fashionable pleasure with each dragging day wondering whether fifty years from now your important life and important loves and important thoughts and important tastes won’t be just another fifty year lull that someone notes in passing as if human life were born with him a relic of fifty years of five year plans and then it strikes you that maybe you ought to dig your ditch and stay in it for good

Fifteenth Rotation

Nausea can’t come soon enough when that old man yonder can’t die soon enough expecting to catch one last glance amidst the mist of an empty prison, a squirrel cage too rusted, worn and frail so give it another disjointed spin long awaited is the silent supplication of a dying God…? His crutch his cross your heart and hope to die is not the question only an answer to all your doubts because He won’t listen until you take another spin-in the squirrel cage.

Poetry for imaginative conservatives may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.

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The conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest. - Russell Kirk